We’ve all heard of the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, but did you know that now you can get text messages from Butterball reminding you to start thawing your turkey and what temperature it should cook at? At Butterball.com (also available in a mobile version) you can also watch how-to videos and participate in live chats to ensure your turkey is as delectable as possible this Thanksgiving.

Butterball really understands that the world is evolving and how people are using new resources to find information these days.  When the Turkey Talk-Line was launched 28 years ago in 1981, that was the best way for a consumer to get information. But with the growth of the internet, people are now searching online for videos, testimonials and recipes like never before. I personally don’t own a cookbook I use regularly – Instead, I just search online for recipes. Where did I find my pie recipes for an early Thanksgiving this year? AllRecipes.com and FoodNetwork.com.

NOTE: Read the entire article to learn how to get a free pizza the day before Thanksgiving from Papa Johns!

A desktop version of analytics just recently came out that is available as an Adobe AIR application. It’s nifty because it saves all of your login information as separate profiles and loads much faster than the web interface. Since it’s an AIR app you need to download the AIR runtime environment first and then you can download the application.

When you go to the site it’s in the bottom right hand corner called “Analytics Reporting Suite”

Adobe AIR Google Analytics - The Google Analytics Reporting Suite enables you to use Google Analytics in your desktop. You can track your visitors, referrals and campaigns, view your AdWords ROI metrics & more.

Download AIR from here
http://get.adobe.com/air/

Download the GA app from here
http://www.aboutnico.be/

Facebook has released its latest iPhone application, allowing Facebookers to gain even greater control of their profiles and communication from their iPhone.  Here’s a quick rundown of enhancements:

• Accept and make new friend requests
• Much quicker response time and less delays when accessing Facebook
• Full inbox and notification access
• New photo tagging and captioning capabilities
• Improved navigation in friends, photos and comments

Many are excited about these new upgrades, but some important questions still loom…

• Is Facebook planning any updates for other phone applications?  Blackberry?
• What enhancements can we expect from the MySpace-iPhone app?
• What impact will this have on those who use Twitter?
• Any chance this new app will alter some reliance on texting and AIM?
• Will this encourage iPhone junkies who may be Facebook laggards to finally create a Facebook profile?
• At what point will Facebook make the capabilities and functionality available on your phone replicate all those available from a desktop?
• How creepy will it be when the Chess team captain from high school makes a friend request of you…on your phone?

SlyDial is a magic piece of Internet technology that passes the test of what is required to be awesome: It fulfills an existing need.

And if you’d rather scratch out your eyes then have to talk on the phone, there’s definitely an existing need.

This idea is so awesome it defies reason. Essentially, it sends you directly to anyone’s cellular voicemail. This way, if you need to get a message to someone but don’t want to actually have to talk to them, you can leave your message, and if they call back, you can see them on your caller ID and ignore them.

It only works with cell phones, though. But hey, whatever. It’ll keep you from having to talk to any idiot siblings.

When Google Chrome came out early this month, there was a lot of fanfare - from blogs like this one, and from news sources including USA Today and NPR. That’s to say nothing of all the comments about it on social media sites, which was, for a moment or two, deafening.

The dust has settled, and now we’re almost a month into this new browser from Google. It has taken some getting used to, even ignoring some of the problems just because they aren’t such big deals. (Like getting Chrome to use the full screen of a monitor turned sideways. It doesn’t.)

What I want to know is where are all of the plug ins developers were supposed to be hammering out for this thing? The big draw for Firefox has always been the number of plug-ins and add-ons. So far, if I want to Stumble or tag pages or use Zemanta for blogging, I have to flip over to Firefox.

I don’t know if I’m being too impatient or not - it is possible. But no one can fairly review this browser until these additions happen.

In the meantime, Google has been very busy busting people who are interested in helping them develop their product. http://www.chromeplugins.org/’s story is viewable on the site - with stories of being informed by Google that they could not use the Chrome logo, the Chrome intro comic, nor even Chrome images that were released through Creative Commons.

So… yeah. At least they’re not Microsoft… sorta… right?

While I was checking on a client’s CrazyEgg results on Monday, I was greeted with the following message:

Usually when a site goes down, you have to keep checking back throughout the day to get results (and working with paid search has made me more of an instant gratification kind of gal). However, CrazyEgg decided that the best way to ease customer frustrations is by offering them a Crazy Egg game, which is both a great distraction and unique product tie-in. I left the site a couple minutes later after sampling the game, with no frustrations, but understanding that sites do go down, and that it was okay for me to check back soon (the site was live again within 20 minutes).

Maybe this is the kind of example Twitter and others who are consistently down should follow?